Patching until the COWs come home (part 1)

Posted Mar 23, 2021 16:12 UTC (Tue) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: Patching until the COWs come home (part 1) by pbonzini
Parent article: Patching until the COWs come home (part 1)

Well sure, but in the (absurd) hypothetical where we're eliminating COW, the kernel would presumably need to grow an interface with capabilities similar to fork+exec, and the POSIX standard name for that interface is posix_spawn.

Patching until the COWs come home (part 1)

Posted Mar 23, 2021 23:00 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Apparently, people dislike posix_spawn. Perhaps we would grow a full replacement that would allow to create a suspended process, tweak its attributes (using file handle-based API) and then resume it.

But I feel what we might actually get is a io_uring-based API that does this using BPF.

Patching until the COWs come home (part 1)

Posted Mar 24, 2021 1:45 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

We _almost_ have that api already: ptrace.

Minor problem being that ptrace is really awful. It's too bad the proposals to add a saner handle based version have all died off.